Without throwing away backwards compatibility, it's pretty hard to improve the format. They could have easily done that, of course, but it was clearly not on t

Without throwing away backwards compatibility, it's pretty hard to improve the format. They could have easily done that, of course, but it was clearly not on the cards, politically. As a programmer, I think that's a bad decision, but it might have been the right decision for the user. It's hard to say. Word Perfect actually had a vaguely non-sucky file format. When they "handed over"[1] development from the original WP team I had the opportunity to chat with them about it. They were very, very proud of having designed an actual file format rather than just dumping crap onto disk. Essentially, it was a stream of tokens, each token representing a command. Again, it's been ages, so forgive me if I get this wrong, but you would have a "bold on" token, followed by some text, followed by a "bold off" token. For more complicated tokens I seem to remember they would embed the options in the token. If you have ever used WP, you may have seen the "reveal codes" feature (which was WP's "killer feature"). This was pretty much the actual representation of the stream. It allowed the user to see exactly how the formatting codes were layed out so that you could fix problems (instead of trying to guess why you have some bizarre vertical space in your document as you often have to do with Word). The main problem with WP's file format was that it was very, very easy to generate illegal streams or to mismatch tokens (especially to get the options wrong between the start and close tokens). I always tell people never cut and paste in WP because it will corrupt the document eventually (a little more technical background: cut and paste was implemented by going through the RTF filter and back, which could easily corrupt the tokens on the way through). [1] Cautionary tale: Word Perfect Corporation was a generous company. When Word Perfect became very, very popular, they rewarded the original programmers handsomely. However, instead of giving the programmers equity, they gave them gigantic raises. By the time Corel acquired WP, the original programmers were on salaries that would make even high flying valley programmers blush. After sitting out the time period that they were contracturally obliged to, Corel replaced those people with cheaper talent (roughly 1/10th the cost!). That included me. I always felt horrible about the situation, but fervently hoped that the programmers managed to save some of their ridiculous previous salaries.